


your ghost crawls home

by memitims



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, M/M, Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 02:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3157580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memitims/pseuds/memitims
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>come home</i>, reads the small piece of paper</p>
            </blockquote>





	your ghost crawls home

**April 2014**

After the mess with HYDRA and the helicarriers and the ghost of his best friend, Steve stays in Washington D.C. He doesn’t tell anyone that it’s because he thinks it will be easier for Bucky to find him here, not when they’ll probably do the practical thing and tell him that Bucky could find him anywhere, he’s a trained assassin that could probably track anyone anywhere. There’s something instinctual inside him tethering him to the place where his best friend came back to life, came back to him. Steve doesn’t know how to explain it to his friends.

He hangs out with Sam, and occasionally Natasha, and he has long conversations with Fury and Maria Hill about how to move forward with what’s left of a splintering SHIELD. No one asks him about Bucky, but they all look at him with sad, sympathetic eyes whenever the Winter Soldier is brought up. Steve wishes they wouldn’t. He tries to get them to look for Bucky a few times, asks them about any possible leads they have, but no one comes up with anything helpful. Eventually, Steve stops asking. They all have more important things to focus on. For Steve, however, Bucky has always been the most important thing. Sometimes, he spends an entire day searching the city, going back to the riverbank where Bucky pulled him out or the remaining husk of SHIELD’s grounds, desperately hoping for any sign of a clue.

(“I already know how to lose him, technically this should be easier. The first time was just practice,” he jokes to Sam, but neither of them laugh and the words feel bitter in his throat. They both know that Steve would do anything just to have a second chance.)

Steve’s sorting through his mail one bright April morning, when a piece of paper slips out from between the stack of bills and letters. He reads it slowly and picks it up with trembling hands. He would know that handwriting anywhere.

 _Steve_ , it says,  _stop looking for me._

He lays the piece of paper flat in front of him and traces the letters with a finger, his vision blurring at the edges. Bucky’s here, he’s close, he didn’t flee to halfway around the world like Steve had been half-afraid of. It means there’s got to be parts of Bucky trapped inside the Winter Soldier, that he’s not completely gone, and Steve has a chance to bring him home. Only Bucky would remember writing the notes, that was their thing, and Steve had lived a long time thinking he would never get another torn-up piece of paper with Bucky’s handwriting scrawled across it.

Steve reaches over and grabs a post-it note from one of his kitchen drawers and writes  _NO_  on it, in capital letters, and sticks it in his mail slot downstairs.

\---

**January 1938**

When they’re kids, Bucky has the bizarre habit of writing notes and leaving them all over the place. He’s never without a pad of paper, just like Steve almost always carries his sketchbook with him. They are quite the pair, the two of them. Steve’s the dreamer, always staring off into space and planning his latest sketch, thinking about all the ways their life is bound to get better. He dreams about bigger apartments and never getting sick again and the way Bucky smiles at him. Bucky’s the practical one, always leaving notes for himself and making sure Steve gets enough to eat and gently bandaging Steve’s cuts and bruises after another brutal fight. It switches sometimes – Bucky can dream just as big as Steve and Steve can take care of Bucky with the same kind of patience and determination – because their lives are complicated and filled with hardship, but they both believe that if their lives stayed tangled up together, they’ll get out okay on the other side.

Bucky’s notes litter their small apartment, suggestions to himself about jobs he could apply for, reminders to Steve to pick up his prescriptions from the pharmacy, lists of songs they both like, dance clubs around the city that they haven’t been to yet.

It might’ve driven other people crazy, but Steve doesn’t mind. He likes finding traces of Bucky all over the apartment, likes reading the bad jokes Bucky sometimes leaves on the kitchen counter. Plus, Steve likes to doodle silly things on the blanks spaces between Bucky’s words. He draws animals or stars or flowers in the corners, just to see Bucky’s eyes crinkle when he sees his old notes.

Steve reads so many of those damn things that he can tell exactly what kind of mood Bucky is in based on his handwriting – big, loopy scribbles means that he’s happy and small, tight print usually means that he’s angry at something or someone. Steve knows to stay out of Bucky’s way on those days, but it wasn’t like Bucky really ever takes it out on him, anyways. Sure, they fight sometimes, but it never last for long. They’re smiling at each other again in no time.

They fight more during the winter months. It’s almost always about Steve’s health, about the way his lungs rattle and his hands shake from the cold. This year, Steve couldn’t find a job for the winter, no one wants to hire him when there are plenty of stronger, able-bodied men willing to do the same work. He sells his drawings sometimes, but it’s not much. It means Bucky has to work long hours at the garage, fixing up automobiles for rich families that look down their nose at Bucky’s oil-stained clothes. Steve knows he hates that part of the job, but he does like tinkering with the cars.  _It just makes sense to me_ , Bucky had told him one night over dinner, when Steve had asked why he liked fixing cars so much.

So Steve waits at home, lonely and bored. It makes him irritable. He hates that Bucky has to do all the work, hates that he probably wouldn’t even be here without Bucky, hates that he drags Bucky down with his problems, hates that Bucky could do so much better for himself if he just let Steve go; Steve’s pretty sure Bucky doesn’t need Steve the same way Steve needs him.

(It’s almost funny, how wrong he is. But Steve doesn’t know that.)

Steve sits at the kitchen table, drumming his fingers across the wood and staring out their small, grimy window onto the quiet street below. It’s snowing outside. Steve hates the snow, but something about being cooped up all day makes him want to forget about that and ignore the note Bucky left in front of him before he went to work – T _oo cold today, don’t go outside_ , it reads. He knows Bucky will be home soon, so it’s his last chance to get some fresh air before Bucky comes back and makes sure Steve stays inside where it’s warm.

He pushes the chair back from the table and stands up, grabbing his worn, threadbare coat from beside the front door and wrapping it around his shoulders. Steve pushes the door open and makes his way down the old wooden stairs of their building. A cold burst of wind almost knocks Steve over when he gets out of the building, but he fights through it. He stands on the sidewalk, planting his worn-out brown boots in the snow, and takes a deep breath. His lungs crackle and pieces of falling snow dust across his face and into his mouth, but it feels incredible to breathe fresh air.

“ _Goddamnit_ ,” a voice cries from behind him. “What the hell are you thinking?

Steve whips around. Bucky’s standing there, his arms folded over his dark grey jacket, and Steve can see that his eyes look scared, even through the flurries of snow that cloud the air. He looks down sheepishly, his body starting to shiver. Steve hates making Bucky look like that, knows that Bucky worries about Steve way too much for his own good. Bucky’s lucky – he’s strong and healthy, but somehow he still got stuck worrying about pneumonia and tuberculosis and all the rest, because no matter how Steve tries to convince his best friend that he’s fine, that everything will be okay, Bucky still damn near loses his head fussing over Steve.

“Couldn’t take another minute of sitting alone in there,” he says, trying to make Bucky understand. “Needed to be outside, just for a second.” He watches Bucky’s eyes soften at the words.

“You’re the dumbest kid in Brooklyn, Steve Rogers, you know that?” Bucky moves closer and slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders, pulling him in close to his body. He’s not mad, like Steve expected, he just smiles fondly at Steve in the way that warms him more than any jacket ever could. “Let’s go get you warmed up.”

\---

**May 2014**

The notes keep coming. Steve finds one in his mailslot almost every other day. He’s tempted to camp out in front of the bank of mailboxes overnight and catch Bucky in the act, but he doesn’t want to scare him, doesn’t want to push his boundaries and make him disappear forever. According to Bucky’s notes, he’s been doing some sort of therapy that Fury offered him, and Steve had been livid when he’d found that Fury had found and contacted Bucky without telling him.

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Fury says when Steve confronts him about it. “Part of our agreement was that I never mention it to you. It’s helping him, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”

“Is he doing okay?” Steve asks quietly, desperate for anything. He can’t stop the nightmares from coming – the ones where Bucky doesn’t recognize him, the ones where he disappears forever, the ones where HYDRA take him away, the ones where Bucky loses himself completely – because the notes Bucky leaves are vague and cryptic and Steve wouldn’t be surprised if they one day stopped coming altogether. Steve doesn’t know if he’d be able to handle that, to have Bucky so close and then yanked away from him again.

“His brain– it’s complicated.” Fury sighs. “He’s making progress, getting his memories back, but the more he remembers, the more he doesn’t want to remember. He’s not a danger to anyone anymore, we’re pretty sure of that, and–”

“I need to see him,” Steve interrupts.

Fury shakes his head solemnly. “That’s not up to me, I’m afraid. It’s up to him.”

Steve looks down at his feet and when he looks back up, Fury is gone. He turns away, heading back into his kitchen. His fingers brush over the pile of Bucky’s notes on the kitchen table. Steve hasn’t thrown a single one away, just placed them in a stack and occasionally doodled on some like he did as a kid.

He tears off a piece of paper from his notepad and scribbles on it with his favorite blue pen.  _Do you remember Coney Island?_  he writes, sketching a small ferris wheel at the bottom and rushing downstairs to stick it in his mailbox.

Steve doesn’t get a response for a few days, but when he does, it makes his heart practically jump out of his chest when he sees it.  _Of course_ , reads the loopy handwriting,  _I won you that giant teddy bear and we ate a pound of cotton candy. You threw up on the damn Cyclone._

Bucky’s in there, Steve knows it now for sure.

\---

**March 1943**

Even after they escape from the burning HYDRA base – anger boiling in Steve’s veins when he thinks about Bucky waiting on the other side of the fiery cavern for him, stupidly risking his life because he was too stubborn to leave without Steve; awe and wonderment crawling across Bucky’s face as he looks Steve up in down, because he always knew Steve was a hero but now he has the body to match his bravery and the size of his heart – and are thrown into the shared chaos of war, Bucky still writes his damn notes.

It’s even worse, because their shared tent is small, and boredom is rampant. It’s Bucky’s distraction from real life though – always has been – or maybe his way to cope with the shitty hand they’d been dealt, so Steve doesn’t complain.

They remind him of home.

They’re camping out on the frozen slopes of the Alps, chasing rumors of an important HYDRA train, and it’s Steve’s last night on earth with Bucky (at least in the 20th century) but he doesn’t know it yet.

Steve’s shivering in his sleeping bag, his teeth chattering in a way they haven’t since those cold winter nights in Brooklyn, and Bucky notices. Of course Bucky notices, he notices everything about Steve, with that concerned brow and those sharp eyes, always looking out for his best friend. Steve doesn’t know what he did to deserve someone who cares so much.

“Cold?” Bucky asks, his voice rumbly with sleep. He shifts in his sleeping bag so their shoulders touch in the darkness. Steve already feels warmer. He doesn’t get cold much in his new body, but the hard packed snow under their tent chills him to the bone, makes him feel scared and weary. Steve never liked being cold, never liked the ice and snow, it always made his chest hurt something awful and his breath rattle dangerously in his throat. He was always afraid he’d never get warm, but Bucky had a knack for making him forget about that.

“Yeah. Just like old times,” Steve says, trying to make a joke. Bucky doesn’t laugh. Instead, he pulls his pen from behind his ear and grabs the pad next to his sleeping bag, scribbling something furiously onto the paper. He hands it to Steve.

 _I’ll keep you warm_ , it reads.

Steve grins. “Aw jeez, Buck. Always knew you were a romantic.”

As soon as the words are out of Steve’s mouth, he wants to take them back. They’re too dangerously close to acknowledging what but they both know is between them, but don’t have the courage to talk about. Steve thinks it’s almost funny, in a tragic sort of way. Two of the dumbest, bravest kids in Brooklyn, two soldiers getting shot at every other day on the unfamiliar soil of Europe, and neither of them have the guts to hold the other’s hand.

Bucky doesn’t say anything in return, he just wrestles an arm out of his sleeping bag and slings it across Steve’s chest, pulling him tight against his body like they’re back in their bed in Brooklyn. Steve feels almost instantly warmer, his teeth calming down as he listens to the soft sound of Bucky’s breath against the back of his neck.

They leave the tent together in the morning. They’re whole, two whole men that smile at each through the sprinkle of snow falling from the sky.

Steve returns alone, his heart shattered into a million pieces. He knows he’s never going to be whole again.

He takes one look at the inside of their tent – the sleeping bags tangled up together, Bucky’s notes scattered across the floor – and falls to his knees onto the cold, wet snow. It stings his face and through his uniform, but he can’t feel it. All he can feel is the hollow space between his ribs and the tears gathering at the corner of his eyes.

“Bucky,” he cries, choking on the sound of his best friend’s name. He repeats Bucky’s name, over and over, as if it will bring him back. It doesn’t. The howling wind carries the sound away and Steve is left with nothing.

Steve rips up every single piece of paper. He leaves only the last one, but he can’t read the words without falling apart. He tucks it into his uniform, and it stays there for a very long time.

\---

**June 2014**

Steve’s rifling through his old Captain America uniform, the one he wore for seventy years under the ice, when he finds it. He was looking for it on a whim, the ghost of an old, painful memory flashing behind his eyes. He traces his fingers over the words.

_I’ll keep you warm. I’ll keep you warm. I’ll keep you warm._

He remembers pulling it out of his uniform as he aimed the nose of Schmidt’s plane towards the icy ground, his brain slowly going blank while Peggy’s calm voice rings in his ears. Steve remembers opening up the piece of paper for the last time, Bucky’s written words filling his vision. He remembers reading the line quietly, under his breath, his last words a tragic testament to his dead best friend, probably the goddamn love of his life, and the plane hurls faster and faster towards the ground.

Steve shakes himself back into the present. He knows what he needs to do.

He sits down at the kitchen table and rummages through the ever-growing stack of Bucky’s notes, looking for the very first one, the one with instructions from two months ago to give up his search for Bucky, the one Steve had so stubbornly ignored. He makes a noise of triumph when he finds it, flipping it over to the blank back side.  _Come home_ , Steve writes on it. He draws a small picture of a broken heart, but decides it’s probably a bad idea. He crosses out the heart, just hopes the words will be enough.

Rummaging through his kitchen drawers, Steve finds a stapler. He positions the newest note over the one from 1943 and staples them together. This one goes into Steve’s mailslot too, but this one makes him nervous. He’s putting his heart on the line in the best way he knows how, and Steve’s afraid it’ll make Bucky run, afraid that it’ll make Bucky disappear, and Steve will be left with a bleeding hole in his chest.

It doesn’t. Bucky turns up at his doorstep the next morning.

Steve gapes at him for a moment, unable to speak. Bucky looks so much better than when Steve last saw him, his eyes no longer cold and dull, his face shaved but his hair still long, and he’s dressed in black civilian clothes that look like something Steve would’ve picked for him.

Bucky holds out his hand, the two stapled notes clutched in his fist. “This still valid?” he asks, giving Steve a smirk that rocks him to his core, because it’s identical to the one he fell in love with before he even knew what the feeling was.

It’s quiet for a moment, and Steve can feel his eyes widening incredulously before he laughs. “Of course, Buck. Of course.” He wants to step forward and wrap Bucky in his arms, but he’s not sure where they stand, he wants Bucky to make the first move. They stare at each other for a few beats, Steve’s eyes tracing the crinkles around Bucky’s face, the bow of his lips, the relaxed set of his shoulders, so different from the hardened stance of the Winter Soldier.

Bucky takes a step forward and he slowly pulls Steve in close, cautious – like he’s waiting for Steve to call it all off, to push him away, to tell him to stop. Steve doesn’t. Instead, he buries his face in Bucky’s shoulders and breathes him in. He smells like shaving cream and peppermint, and it’s so close to the way Bucky used to smell a century ago that it damn near breaks Steve’s heart.

They pull apart. “Will you come in?” Steve asks quietly. Bucky nods and follows Steve into his apartment.

Steve’s not quite sure what to say. He has too many questions, there’s too many words bubbling up inside his throat, a lifetime of words, ones he never thought he’d have the chance to say to Bucky. Bucky’s eyes roam the apartment, his gaze catching on the stack of paper on the kitchen counter.

“You kept them?” he asks incredulously, “all of them?” He reaches out and runs his hands through the pile. “And– you drew on them?” Bucky laughs. “Just like old times.”

“Yeah,” Steve says hoarsely, “just like old times.”

Bucky looks over at him, his eyes tired and sad. “I’m different,” he says. “Not all the way here. Just thought you should know.”

“I don’t care.” Steve crosses his arms over his chest stubbornly. “And you are here – you’re home. That’s all that really matters. Bucky, I tried to live without you. And quite frankly, it sucked. So, I’ll take whatever I can get. We’ll work it out, Buck, okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky mumbles. “Okay.”

“You better keep writing notes though, got it? I missed your damn notes.”

“I know,” Bucky laughs. “I promise.”


End file.
